Maintainability in UX Design: keys to scalability and quality
One of the most important yet often underestimated aspects of UX design is its maintainability. Maintainability refers to the ease with which a design can be updated, improved, and adapted over time.
It’s common to see the applications we use daily evolve to include new features or undergo complete redesigns, sometimes enhancing and other times complicating our experience with them.
However, such changes are necessary to move away from products that promote only static solutions, often not inclusive or adaptable for all users.
A maintainable UX design not only ensures a better experience for users but also facilitates the ongoing work of design and development teams, enabling the product to evolve smoothly over time.
In this blog post, we’ll explain the importance of maintainability in UX design and the key practices to achieve it.
Importance of updating and maintainability of applications
Maintainability primarily ensures that a product is adaptable. User needs evolve, technologies advance, and design trends emerge.
A maintainable design allows the product to adapt quickly to these changes without requiring a complete overhaul.
Moreover, it indirectly reduces maintenance costs, as updates are handled more efficiently with fewer resources. Maintainable design prevents costly redesigns and rebuilds.
The primary requirement to achieve this is user feedback. The concept of data-driven design helps uncover common issues or friction points based on user feedback and product analytics, which can heavily impact the overall perception of a product.
Resources for ensuring maintainability
To ensure that our designs remain maintainable and adaptable to evolving user needs, we rely on several key resources that guarantee consistency and design quality over time:
1. Comprehensive documentation
Detailed documentation is essential for maintainability. Including style guides, design specifications, user flows and component descriptions ensures that any team member, present or future, can understand and work with the design.
2. Modular design
Taking a modular approach to design through design systems allows individual components to be updated independently without affecting the entire system.
Reusable modules such as buttons, forms, and menus make modifications easier and maintain consistency. Additionally, they help ensure brand alignment and design coherence across the product.
3. Team training and alignment
One of the biggest challenges in maintainability is misalignment among team members:
- Some may not recognize its importance
- Others may resist change or have conflicting ideas
Workshops, brainstorming sessions, or training on maintainability ensure that all team members are aligned and understand their role in maintaining and updating the design.
See also: Inception Sessions: Establishing solid foundations for successful UX projects
4. User testing and feedback
Ongoing feedback on usability helps identify issues and improvement opportunities before they become serious problems.
Regular testing ensures that the design remains relevant and effective, and it also helps reveal future work directions. This, in turn, improves work efficiency and enhances design quality.
Final considerations
There are two crucial points to keep in mind:
- Balance innovation with maintainability. Creativity can help deliver unique, engaging experiences, while standardization is key for ensuring long-term maintainability and design consistency. Striking the right balance benefits both scalability and differentiation, which are important to the business.
- Keeping documentation up to date can be tedious, but it saves a lot of headaches. It helps establish clear processes and responsibilities, guiding efforts around scalability and ongoing improvement.
Maintainability in UX design is essential to meet changing market needs. With detailed documentation, modular design, ongoing team training, and constant user feedback, costs are reduced, user experience improves, and products stay relevant and effective over time.
This is a translation of the following article from our corporate website:
